Well, in order to appease crazyinsomniac's shock at the lack of substr() solutions, here's a fun little version:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$_ = 'x' x 11;
my($x,$y) = \(substr($_,2,2), substr($_,5));
while(<DATA>){
    print $$x,$$y;
}
__END__
1996.40637
1996.41064
1996.41199
1996.41467
1996.41882
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